Are LinkedIn Company Page Updates Worth It?

Are LinkedIn Company Page Updates Worth It?

Have you heard about the latest feature available for company pages on LinkedIn? If you haven't, read on... LinkedIn recently released Sponsored Updates for company pages. These are similar to the sponsored posts on Facebook and Twitter, but are different than the Targeted Updates that LinkedIn already offers.

So, what exactly are LinkedIn Sponsored Updates? LinkedIn's Sponsored Updates are paid-for updates that are shared with a specific audience. You can specify by job title, location, company, and now gender, among other parameters.

Who should use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates? If you have a company page with not a lot of followers or you want to expand beyond your follower base, you can now create Sponsored Updates to reach your target market.

Targeted VS Sponsored Updates

How do LinkedIn's Sponsored Updates differ from their Targeted Updates? Targeted Updates are free and allow you to send an update to a targeted audience based on company size, industry, function, seniority, geography, and employee and/or non-employee. Sponsored Updates, on the other hand, cost money, but allow you to get very specific to the audience your update is shared with. You can specify your targeted audience by location, company, job title, school, skills, group, gender, and age.

What's It Going To Cost Me?

How much does a LinkedIn Sponsored Update cost? It's not cheap to create a Sponsored Update. LinkedIn's Sponsored Updates cost more than Facebook and Twitter's equivalent. The cost will vary based on your targeted audience. For example, the current the cost of 1000 impressions is $17.50. If you want more impressions, the price goes up.

Are LinkedIn's Sponsored Updates worth the cost? I honestly don't know yet. There is definitely potential to drive traffic to your company page, but time will tell if the price is worth the return on investment. This is what the stats will look like for a Sponsored Update:

My $35 investment ended up making just under 3000 impressions. It significantly increased views to my page (%400) but only 8 clicks and I didn't get a single new follower. To be fair, I just posted my most popular blog post to date, but didn't strategize beyond that. Is it worth the money? If you have a large budget or really need more Company page followers - then maybe yes. They are cheaper than LinkedIn Ads - but if you have a big network or a lot of Company page followers - I'd just stick with organic updating.

How do I create a Sponsored Update?

Unfortunately, it's NOT intuitive, but if you've used Facebook Sponsored Updates or Facebook Ads, this might make sense to you. Below are LinkedIn's directions. If you are a visual person and prefer to see it in action, check out my tutorial video here: http://youtu.be/MvVie3dndMU

Let me know what you think of LinkedIn's new Sponsored Updates feature in the comments section below!

About the Author: Viveka

Viveka is author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and is known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert”.CEO of Linked Into Business, she also hosts the biggest LinkedIn chat on Twitter. Forbes has listed her as a top social media influencer for three years running, and she has been cited in Ragan, CNN, Forbes, Mashable, Simple Living, Bloomberg, LinkedIn's Small Business Site and "The Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to LinkedIn, The Miami Herald, Social Media Today and The Social Media Examiner!